TL;DR: Great space 2D RPG with an arcade minigame and an RTS minigame and a whole lot of text quests for the extra retro feel. Really addictive, if you liked FTL, buy it. If you didn't, buy it anyway!

I must say, this game is great! I've had tons and tons of fun with the previous installments of this little franchise and the newest one, A War Apart is definitely the best of them. The basic gameplay which will make up most of the time you play is a top-down 2D turn-based RPG, although the turns can run smoothly without a pause unless something happens or you chose to change the course of your spaceship or the unfortunate target of your weapons. It offers a great variety of weapons, equipment and ship hulls both you and the AI can use. You can upgrade and enhance every piece of equipment you have and alter its stats using rare items called micromodules.

This variety also brings a great number of different playstiles, you can trade, complete missions for governments of different planets, be a pirate (ARRR!) and rob trading ships for money and goods, be a warrior and slay hundreds of pirates and aliens or chose any combination of those and others. Anything goes! You can also literally do nothing, just sit back and watch as the universe goes on without you, every ship pursues its own goals regardless of player's actions.

The standard quests are pretty dull, either it's a parcell delivery, guard star system, kill this one guy and so on. The quests are quite silly and can contain nice little references. But they pay you in much needed cash and some rare items, if you get lucky.

Then there are two kinds of special quests. Planetary quests bring up old-fashiond text quests which are really nice and fun, every single one of them is different and it really is a time machine that brings you a few decades back.

The other kind is the RTS strategy "minigame" that lets you test your strategic skill against one to three AI armies of robots. There are resource factories you can capture and even destroy. Those can be protected by 4 kinds of deffensive turrets. The units you and the AIs control are modular robots. You can customise every single robot you make, you chose the hull, chasis, head and weapons. All these have different characteristics like speed, HP, damage, range, resource cost and so on. You can also take manual control of a robot you created and move and shoot with it as in a third-person-shooter. But I'm bad at RTS games and always get my butt kicked by the AI so I never really appretiated this game mode.

On your journeys through the universe, you can also stumble apon a Black hole (should be called a wormhole, though). Going through it lets you a play an arcade top-down minigame where you fly your ship using arrow keys in an arena-like area, pick-up power-ups and shoot enemy ships with your weapons. After you deal with the ships that are inside, you get a random, usually rare item and appear in a different star system. The minigame is quite fun and is a nice, simple addition to the game.
Both the graphics and the GUI are a bit outdated and lack customization options, and some stuff gets too repetitive pretty fast. Same thing with the soundtrack. While the soundtrack is quite good, every single track is very distinctive and in a game that offers a great amount of playtime, it all gets very repetitive and a music mod would come in handy.

The developers updated and balanced the game after release and the game turned out to be pretty balanced and additional content can bring the veterans of the franchise back to play and actually offer something new to the old players, which is really nice and I hope that one day, Space Rangers 3 will see the light of day.

To sum this up, once you get into it, it's a lot of fun and you can spend hundreds of hours with this game. There are some issues but the good qualities prevail.
I give this fun little russian game 8 bottles of vodka out of 10.

TL;DR: Great space 2D RPG with an arcade minigame and an RTS minigame and a whole lot of text quests for the extra retro feel. Really addictive, if you liked FTL, buy it. If you didn't, buy it anyway! I must say, this game is great! I've had tons and tons of fun with the previous installments of this little franchise and the newest one, A War Apart is definitely the best of them. The basic gameplay which will make up most of the time you play is a top-down 2D turn-based RPG, although the turns can run smoothly without a pause unless something happens or you chose to change the course of your spaceship or the unfortunate target of your weapons. It offers a great variety of weapons, equipment and ship hulls both you and the AI can use. You can upgrade and enhance every piece of equipment you have and alter its stats using rare items called micromodules. This variety also brings a great number of different playstiles, you can trade, complete missions for governments of different planets, be a pirate (ARRR!) and rob trading ships for money and goods, be a warrior and slay hundreds of pirates and aliens or chose any combination of those and others. Anything goes! You can also literally do nothing, just sit back and watch as the universe goes on without you, every ship pursues its own goals regardless of player's actions. The standard quests are pretty dull, either it's a parcell delivery, guard star system, kill this one guy and so on. The quests are quite silly and can contain nice little references. But they pay you in much needed cash and some rare items, if you get lucky. Then there are two kinds of special quests. Planetary quests bring up old-fashiond text quests which are really nice and fun, every single one of them is different and it really is a time machine that brings you a few decades back. The other kind is the RTS strategy "minigame" that lets you test your strategic skill against one to three AI armies of robots. There are resource factories you can capture and even destroy. Those can be protected by 4 kinds of deffensive turrets. The units you and the AIs control are modular robots. You can customise every single robot you make, you chose the hull, chasis, head and weapons. All these have different characteristics like speed, HP, damage, range, resource cost and so on. You can also take manual control of a robot you created and move and shoot with it as in a third-person-shooter. But I'm bad at RTS games and always get my butt kicked by the AI so I never really appretiated this game mode. On your journeys through the universe, you can also stumble apon a Black hole (should be called a wormhole, though). Going through it lets you a play an arcade top-down minigame where you fly your ship using arrow keys in an arena-like area, pick-up power-ups and shoot enemy ships with your weapons. After you deal with the ships that are inside, you get a random, usually rare item and appear in a different star system. The minigame is quite fun and is a nice, simple addition to the game. Both the graphics and the GUI are a bit outdated and lack customization options, and some stuff gets too repetitive pretty fast. Same thing with the soundtrack. While the soundtrack is quite good, every single track is very distinctive and in a game that offers a great amount of playtime, it all gets very repetitive and a music mod would come in handy. The developers updated and balanced the game after release and the game turned out to be pretty balanced and additional content can bring the veterans of the franchise back to play and actually offer something new to the old players, which is really nice and I hope that one day, Space Rangers 3 will see the light of day. To sum this up, once you get into it, it's a lot of fun and you can spend hundreds of hours with this game. There are some issues but the good qualities prevail. I give this fun little russian game 8 bottles of vodka out of 10.